It’s November 2003, and I’m in Strasbourg, France, for a few days while studying abroad. Idolized singer/songwriter Elliott Smith has recently died of a possible suicide, effectively upending any solace I feel about being an earnest, vaguely depressed-yet-idealistic 20-year-old. The Pitchfork-spearheaded indie-rock resurgence is in its infancy, and I’m ambivalent about it; albums by the Shins and Broken Social Scene sit idly in my backpack, too fey or aggressive for me to yet “get” them.

Unwilling to wallow in Smith’s superlative sadness, I shift my sympathies to another prolific songwriter, Ryan Adams. Though a latecomer to Adams’s best album — 2000’s Heartbreaker (Bloodshot), his solo debut after a tumultuous few years as alt-country greats Whiskeytown’s frontman — I admired the honesty and classicism of 2001’s Gold (Universal). Demolition (Universal), from 2002, is as close as I’ll get to unabashedly loving a Bruce Springsteen album. Despite his outlandish public persona (relationship drama, concert-cancellation drama, drugs-and-alcohol drama), being a Ryan Adams fan felt like a ticket to adulthood, proof you could still wear your heart on your sleeve and still make (or enjoy, at least) timeless rock music.

Adams’s style is so road-tested it’s almost anachronistic. An oeuvre of hard-drinking, hard-loving brawlers and bawlers, his recipe of smart aphorisms and personal-but-universal confessionals mines the depths of triumph and tragedy familiar to any producer/listener of Americana past and present. What makes the formula effective (apart from formidable guitar training) is Adams’s ability to reverently update these traditions. My favorite of his songs — the chilling “Cry on Demand,” from Demolition — offers the slightest postmodern suggestions, beginning “So, it’s how the story goes/Can we cut to the scene where I’m holding you close.” The chorus, “Cry on demand/How’d you learn to?/Cry on demand/Teach me if you want to,” nudges that awareness along and reins it in with touching sentiment. At his best, the 32-year-old Adams feels like the only young songwriter in the genre with the authority and authenticity of the big guns.

The replacements
Back in France, I spend my last spare cash on Adams’s 2003 release, Rock N Roll (on Lost Highway, as are all albums that follow). At the onset of the ever-weakening dollar, that $22 meant I spent the next month berating Adams for subjecting me to dinners of stale baguettes or cereal. Prior to RNR, it wasn’t quite embarrassing to be a Ryan Adams fan, but it was something to keep quiet. (An irony of liking supposed “hipster” music is that it’s uncool to like traditional, emotive folk-rockers of Adams’s ilk, while ostentatious arrangements and grandiose sentiments are frequently studied as gospel — Arcade Fire, anyone?) Rock N Roll, though, is a cringe-inducing slough. Adams’s usually terrific, gravelly vocals are reduced to whiny choruses that can’t reach over grandstanding rock riffs; his influences (the Replacements and, yikes, Oasis) are dated and uncomplimentary, yielding an album of ugly posturing.

TEN YEARS, A WAVE | September 26, 2014 As the festival has evolved, examples of Fowlie’s preferred breed of film—once a small niche of the documentary universe—have become a lot more common, a lot more variegated, and a lot more accomplished.

GIRLS (AND BOYS) ON FILM | July 11, 2014 The Maine International Film Festival, now in its 17th year in Waterville, remains one of the region’s more ambitious cultural institutions, less bound by a singular ambition than a desire to convey the breadth and depth of cinema’s past and present. (This, and a healthy dose of music and human-interest documentaries.) On that account, MIFF ’14 is an impressive achievement, offering area filmgoers its best program in years. With so much to survey, let’s make haste with the recommendations. (Particularly emphatic suggestions are marked in bold print.)

AMERICAN VALUES | June 11, 2014 The Immigrant seamlessly folds elements of New York history and the American promise into a story about the varieties of captivity and loyalty.

CHARACTER IS POLITICAL | April 10, 2014 Kelly Reichardt, one of the most admired and resourceful voices in American independent cinema, appears at the Portland Museum of Art Friday night to participate in a weekend-long retrospective of her three most recent films.

LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX | April 09, 2014 Throughout its two volumes and four hours of explicit sexuality, masochism, philosophical debate, and self-analysis, Nymphomaniac remains the steadfast vision of a director talking to himself, and assuming you’ll be interested enough in him to listen and pay close attention.